


nothing's wrong when nothing's true//i live in a hologram of you

by lavenderss



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Best Friends, Crushes, F/F, F/M, Heartbreak, mostly just me trying to be poetic and failing, no idea what this is, while working every carla and lu ship there ever was into a thousand words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28215732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavenderss/pseuds/lavenderss
Summary: Carla and Lu are the same, but only one of them is enough.
Relationships: Carla Rosón Caleruega/Leopoldo "Polo" Benavent Villada, Carla Rosón Caleruega/Lucrecia "Lu" Montesinos Hendrich, Carla Rosón Caleruega/Samuel García Domínguez, Lucrecia "Lu" Montesinos Hendrich/Guzmán Nunier Osuna, Minor or Background Relationship(s), implied Valu but he's not her brother
Comments: 13
Kudos: 22





	nothing's wrong when nothing's true//i live in a hologram of you

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be something... different. but it turned into this. enjoy me trying to be pretentious and failing at it in a limited number of words.  
> (the title is from _buzzcut season_ by lorde and i had the [slowed version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84N5Rw89PCQ&ab_channel=Lollypop) in mind which is the best thing to ever have been uploaded to youtube)

Neon lights are flashing, green, purple, orange and loud. They make Lu feel physically sick.

She's trying not to think about how she got here. She's trying even harder not to think about how she'll get _out_ of here.

It's easier not to think.

She closes her eyes. The _black_ takes her in.

**t w o m o n t h s e a r l i e r**

“-and there's gonna be a live band, not a crappy DJ. I swear, Lu, this is gonna be fun, not like last time-“

Lu doubts that (highly), but a conceivable way of turning Carla down when she's glowing like this doesn't exist. Carla has a way of making people do what she wants. She pays them in smiles and twirls and brimstone butterflies.

“Okay,” Lu relents. It's sharp even though it's _defeat_.

Lu isn't like Carla. Lu doesn't get what she wants through sunrays and dimples and a twinkle in her eye.

Everybody knows that.

“Yes!” Carla squeezes her hand gratefully, laugh clinking in the summer daze that follows her well into October. “I promise, it's gonna be so great, Lu!”

-

Lu wears scarlet stillettos and Carla wears rose-gold sandals. Carla's lipstick is the exact same shade as Lu's shoes; in spite of that, Carla doesn't look like someone who would stab through a vein on your throat with a sharp tip and watch you bleed out.

“Let's go?” Polo asks, quiet, deliberate. All his words serve to give purpose to Carla's, to give purpose to _Carla_. The follower who preceeds the queen.

She smiles at her boyfriend; it's beautiful, but Lu finally catches a _glimpse_.

Carla wouldn't need to go through somebody's neck with a deadly weapon. She would make them beg for it. Kiss, stain, kill. A vampire.

Lu drops her gaze from Carla's whitened teeth a little too late.

Guzmán by her side snorts, making it clear what he thinks of the place. Her arm twined under his doesn't feel anchored; it feels constricted.

Guzmán doesn't look at her when he conquers the crowd, but the cramping in her arm gains a certain desirability.

Lu kisses him two drinks in; he finally looks at her.

Her fingernails are in his back and his bites are on her neck just a few champagne glasses later and a stone-tiled bathroom away.

For the two of them, everywhere is battleground.

-

Lu catches Carla walk out of that same bathroom two hours later, a distinct flush in her cheeks and vampire marks bitten into somebody's neck, and understands that sunflowers, sculpted marble and golden hours are just that; temporary. Flowers die, stone falls apart, the sun sets.

Carla puts them on for a show. The ugly truth is a chestnut ruffle of hair that walks out a minute after her that is too messy to be Polo.

“I lost you, I didn't know where you were,” Carla says _to_ Polo, pecks his lips. He thinks her cheeks are painted rosy, not red.

Lu almost believes it despite what she'd seen. That doesn't make it the truth.

It just makes Carla an actress; the best starlet of her kind.

Lu thought the exposed, _confirmed_ deceit would change something. Make her want less, because she'd know the innocence is false. _Not_ effortless.

Instead, she envies more.

Carla and her _are_ the same, but only one of them is enough.

-

“I know you cheated on Polo.”

“You'd know he cheated on me first, then,” Carla says. She doesn't twitch, lift her head or stop underlining her title with ocean blue. Calm tidal waves brushing golden grains of sand.

Lu flaps her mouth shut.

The blue-blooded vein on Carla's hand pulses. Carla's blue _pencil_ snaps in half.

_Before the storm_. The epiphany makes Lu's head spin.

Carla grabs a different pencil, but nothing is yet lost. Every day, Lu comes closer.

-

The closer she gets, the more she burns. (The harder it is to keep painting _peace_ over the ongoing war.)

She yells at Guzmán and he yells back. She slaps him and he pushes her. She ends up on the ground.

(Carla had smiled at her earlier that day and told her in vanilla-scented words: “Lu, it's not like we _need_ guys anyways.”

Carla and Polo had broken up.)

Guzmán throws her out of his house in the middle of the night, because Carla gave her a hug – Lu had cried in the bathroom because of the previous violent predicament – and then pressed a featherlight kiss on her forehead. The original intention behind Lu's visit was to reconcile with Guzmán, but walking down with the midnight breeze, she doesn't mourn the result: more shouts.

Lu is closer and closer to the end.

-

It happens where it started.

Carla and Lu, Lu and Carla. Dance, silver and vodka. Too much vodka.

Sweat is transparent, the diamond studs in Carla's ears reflective. When they kiss in the middle of the the dance floor, Lu thinks that finally, they're seeing through glass. Nothing is tinted in colours they picked ( _Carla_ picked, Lu unsuccessfully tried to subtract parts from herself to blend with); everything is crystal clear and _true_.

Shower streams flow over Lu. The glitter from Carla's eyelids gets stuck in the drain. Carla _feels_ like silver in her arms, molten and malleable and complements every move Lu makes.

Carla can mend herself into _any_ shape but this time, she fills what Lu lacks and adds more.

It's too good to be true.

-

It is.

Carla fucks that boy from the club again.

Two times, three times. Four times.

Tells Lu about all these.

He works as a _waiter._

Lu wants to scream. She would if she thought the flames would burn someone _(anyone)_ more than herself. The count gets too long for her to keep up.

Once, Carla tells her, unashamedly, conversationally, stuck inbetween two completely unrelated topics, that the _experiment_ was fun.

-

Lu doesn't know what love is, and she doesn't ask. She knows what _pleasure_ is, and she knows it is measurable. The highest rank is out of her reach. Guzmán might not be, but then Lu thinks about _Carla_ and doesn't feel like trying.

Comparison is a bitch. Lu doesn't accept anything other than best; when she couldn't be the top speaker on the debate team, she switched to Model UN.

She goes seeking for a new kind of pleasure. _Different._

One that doesn't remind her of silver and gold and roses and daisies and the cloudy sky of a sunny day, all combined into an image of perfection that deluded Lu into thinking-

She doesn't even know what she was thinking.

-

Drugs are easy to come across. When you're wearing the right little black dress with the right little provocative smirk, they're easy to get without paying.

They're easy to extract from curly boys' mouths.

They're probably too easy to swallow, too, just instead of the flu, they cure a broken heart. Lu doesn't think about that.

The club lights are purple, orange and green. None of Carla's choices.

Lu knows Carla could pick them on her eyeshadow pallete and _claim_ them as hers with a few taps of her make-up brush, if she wanted to.

It's easier to close her eyes altogether and be blind.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [@loquenomedices](loquenomedices.tumblr.com) for when you need a (carmuel or other) moodboard or to ask me what the hell this was


End file.
